Opening an Amazon store alongside your existing online shop may be just the thing you need to grow your business.
Imagine this for a moment. You’ve created an online store with Ecwid and things are going pretty well, but you’re ambitious and want a bigger piece of the pie. What do you do?
If you’ve got growth-pie on the brain, it’s time you considered throwing your hat in the ring on Amazon.
Why Sell on Amazon
First, let’s clear up a couple of things on the front end. We’re not talking about replacing your existing shop(s) with an Amazon account. Amazon’s great, but if you’re only playing in Amazon’s sandbox, you’re leaving serious money on the table.
Your Amazon shop acts instead as a complement to your existing online selling operations. And with Ecwid, you can do it all, right from your Ecwid dashboard (more on that later).
Amazon sales channel in the Ecwid control panel
So why Amazon? Selling on Amazon offers a variety of unique benefits, including untapped revenue streams and even increased interest in — and traffic for — your existing shop(s).
The more your business thrives, the more difficult it will be to grow within your existing infrastructure. So if you want to cultivate continued growth, you’ll have to switch things up a bit: selling new products or expanding into new markets. That’s where Amazon comes in.
Amazon is the largest online seller in the market. And with all that size comes some sizable opportunity.
Some shoppers prefer to do their window shopping on certain marketplaces like Amazon as opposed to search engines like Google. Some limit their searches to what’s available in these spaces to capitalize on member benefits like faster shipping or cash-back bonuses. If you’re only selling through a branded store or social channel, you’re likely to miss this market entirely.
By promoting your products on Amazon, you’ll reach an entirely new segment of shoppers and uncover exciting new sales efficiencies for your budding online enterprise. Amazon even offers some additional seller features to give your revenue a nice boost.
How to Integrate Amazon With Your Ecwid Store
Like all the greatest things — peanut butter and jelly, bacon and eggs, a box of tissues and that floating dresser scene in Titanic — your existing store and your new Amazon shop should work together. And when it comes to e-commerce, unity begins with syncing operations.
If you’re on Ecwid’s Business or Unlimited plans, you’ve already got a leg up on the competition. You can easily integrate your existing store and your new Amazon store right from your Ecwid control panel, allowing the two channels to work in tandem while you manage everything from a single dashboard.
Here are a few of the features you can use once you integrate your channels:
- Synced inventory: Sell a product on one channel and its automatically removed from your inventory on your other channels.
- Customization: Wanna change your prices in one store but not the other? Adapt prices for specific stores to remain competitive.
- Automated listings: Product pictures and information can be uploaded automatically from your existing Ecwid product pages. Upload one and done.
These specialized features stop the two stores from operating against one another, preventing confusion and enabling you to operate your Amazon shop as an extension of your brand.
More: Sell Your Products on Amazon With Real-Time Inventory Synchronization
The best way to leverage both your Ecwid and Amazon stores is to establish your branding on Ecwid and use Amazon as a complement to drive sales and generate traffic to your branded Ecwid store. Once you have your branding in place with your Ecwid store, you can display that brand on Amazon to promote it to a larger audience.
Growing Your Brand on Amazon
Amazon has a lot of traffic, so it’s smart to be there, but an Amazon sale will never be as profitable as a sale from your own branded store. You don’t own the platform so you’re subject to fees, and you don’t own the customer so you’re subject to Amazon’s rules.
Using Amazon to promote your brand is critical to maximizing your profits and building a loyal customer base.
Here are a couple of tips to help you get your brand in front of Amazon’s customers.
1. Incorporate branding in your sales communication
Try displaying your branded logo in product inserts and your automated email sequence. Inserts can be branded materials like product instructions, tips, or guides to help your customers use their new products.
Branded product inserts
You can even set up a product warranty that requires customers to register on your Ecwid site to collect customer information for later marketing.
As long as your packaging, inserts, warranty cards, and gifts are exactly the same for both your Ecwid and Amazon stores, you’ll have no issues with Amazon’s terms of service. However, you should still give Amazon’s terms of service a thorough read to make sure you don’t violate one of its many rules, including direct marketing and linking outside of Amazon.
More: Product Packaging: The Secret To Getting Repeat Customers
2. Offer deals for customers who buy direct
Many savvy Amazon shoppers will search the name of your brand to buy direct from your store if they think you’ll have a better deal.
While you can’t promote special offers to direct customers on your Amazon store, you can give offers some prime real-estate on your Ecwid shop.
Offer a lower price or better giveaways for customers who buy on your branded store to maximize the return from your Amazon traffic.
3. Make Amazon’s customer your customer
When you sell on Amazon, you won’t get the customer’s email address like you would from your own Ecwid store. And this customer is really just Amazon’s until you can connect with them in a meaningful way. So you’ll need to engineer a trick or two to get the buyer to share that golden email address.
Giveaways, social media connections, and free warranty cards are all great ways to encourage shoppers to drop by your website or fill out a form. As long as it makes sense and the customer offers the information of their own volition, you’re in the clear.
A lottery that requires an email to participate
Of course, there are companies that can match up customer addresses and all kinds of other fancy-pants tricks to help you outreach customers, but don’t worry about that for now. That time may come. But for now, start small, keep it simple, and grow from there.
4. Get additional support for your Amazon store
Selling on Amazon can lead to a dramatic increase in traffic and even a rise in consumer insights. And those are both great things. But without the right infrastructure, all that new hullabaloo can also create some unique challenges as well.
- Reviews: Good and bad reviews will impact your reputation and help you refine your product. Learning how to harness and improve reviews is critical to your brand.
- Orders: If things go to plan, a rise in traffic will correlate with a rise in orders. And more orders means more communication.
- Feedback: Sometimes you get negative feedback. It happens. And whether it’s merited or not, negative feedback needs to be addressed to protect your brand.
- Insights: Increased activity on your products and pages can deliver all sorts of insights.
Capturing these will help you detect trends and adjust your selling strategy accordingly.
When your Amazon store takes off, keeping on top of things is no easy task. But there are a few tools out there to help you create some order out of the chaos. One popular option is Feedbackwhiz.com.
Feedbackwhiz is an e-commerce tool to manage orders, contact customers, repair bad reviews, and boost your business on Amazon. In the world of Amazon, more five star reviews means more sales: Feedbackwhiz makes that process even easier with specialized email automation. Encourage positive reviews, prevent negative, and create a two-way conversation with your customers. Got a bad review or a competitor trying to hijack your products? Feedbackwhiz will notify you immediately to help you resolve the issue faster.
Operating on Amazon can be daunting, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. You have little control over prices and no control over fees. But those issues are just a blip on the radar when you consider the size and potential reach of Amazon’s marketplace.
By increasing your Amazon profile, you can unlock new customers, build revenue streams, and increase awareness for your existing e-commerce site. Win, win, win, win, win.